~ two friends, two countries, food between.

Tag Archives: cookies

A friend’s ten year old daughter stayed the weekend while her parents were on a quick trip to the U.K., but Saturday’s rainy and bleak forecast called for a quick change of plans. I had read about Kim Boyce’s
whole wheat chocolate chip cookies the week before; the recipe had the makings for a kid-friendly, healthy baking project. Dee excitedly squealed at the thought of chocolate anything.

Shopping for ingredients in Spain has been a learning experience – the markets are often unpredictable; ingredients varied not only by brand, but by country; and certain comforts of the U.S. are simply unknown (when I suggested oatmeal cookies to Dee, the response, “what is oatmeal?”). Today’s shopping yielded a nine euro, one kg bag of gourmet chocolate chips by Spanish Simon Coll Xocolaters and German butter, creamier than the American variety (note Sandra’s previous post on European dairy).

We preheated the oven to 350 degrees F (~175 degrees C) and greased one baking sheet, as we saved half the dough to do another batch tomorrow. After Dee finished a math quiz learning how to convert cups into pints, we sifted all the dry ingredients together in a large mixing bowl.

In a second bowl, the butter and sugars were blended by hand (a mixer would have come in handy), eggs then added/mixed one at a time, and finally the vanilla. Next, we combined the dry ingredient mix slowly into the wet batter and thereafter, formed our cookies from about three tablespoons of dough at a time. We got fancy with technique, first balling the dough, splitting the ball in half and rejoining to make a rough crease down the middle. The cookies were baked for ~16 minutes (until lightly golden brown) and then transferred to a plate to cool.

The cookies turned out light and fluffy, with the nuttiness of the wheat flour balancing the sweetness of the rich chocolate and sugars. Served warm and soft was best. Sneaking a cookie a couple of hours later, they were lightly crunchy but delish nonetheless and garnered a huge thumbs up from Dee.